wealthcycles.com / By The WealthCycles Staff / February 1, 2013
The results in and, not surprisingly, the winners are… gold and silver! The field of competition: number of Google search requests, or “hits.”
Inspired by comic creator xkcd’s “Calendar of Meaningful Dates,” on which the frequency of Google searches for specific dates in a calendar year is indicated by font size, Anders Sandberg did a similar exercise with the elements represented on the standard Periodic Table of Elements. For those of you who haven’t been in a classroom for a while, that’s the colorful grid chart of letters and numbers that hangs on the wall of virtually every high school science classrooms and college chem lab. Per Wikipedia:
Geeky side note: In the standard periodic table, the rows are called periods, the columns groups. “In chemistry, periodic trends are the tendencies of certain elemental characteristics to increase or decrease as one progresses along a row or column of the periodic table of elements.” Thus the standard or alternate forms of periodic table can be used to identify relationships between different chemical properties and to analyze chemical behavior. Although precursors exist, The publication of the first “widely recognized” periodic table is credited to Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869.
